Summer of Freud

Every year summer arrives as a seemingly plentiful expanse of leisure time. The final weeks of spring are routinely hectic for me, as they are for most graduate students, and I usually distract myself from term papers by fantasizing about reading and viewing projects to be enjoyed in the summer. The summer before entering the M.A. program that I completed in May '07, for instance, was my "summer of Vic Lit" -- Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Woman in White, and The Mill on the Floss. I wanted to knock out a few of the classic works of English fiction, because the grad program I was then soon to embark upon included precious little but theory and philosophy.

Usually I come up with so many different projects in any given spring that none of them get proper concerted attention. Take my summer of Vic Lit, which was meant to include a great deal more Vic Lit but kept getting interrupted by the likes of Mssrs. Aristophanes, Alighieri, Moorcock, and Updike (my Athenian Dramatists, Epic Poets, Contemporary British Novelists and, er, Updike projects, respectively).

This summer was different. My project -- my only project -- was certain from the moment in mid-March when, struggling at once through books by Butler, Bersani, and Deleuze, I determined that I didn't know nearly as much as I needed to about Freud.

So this summer I've read: the "Studies in Hysteria", much of the rest of the "Interpretation of Dreams" (I'd read large portions before), the Dora case, the "Three Essays on Sexuality", the Da Vinci book, the "Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life," the Rat Man, a good number of the metapsychological papers, the "Introductory Lectures" (Old and New), "A Child is Being Beaten", "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", "Group Psychology", "The Ego and the Id", "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" and "The Future of an Illusion". I had already read the Jokes book, the "Uncanny", the Schreber Case, the Wolf Man, "Civilization and its Discontents", and the Outline. This summer also saw readings of Jacques Sédat's theoretical introduction on Freud, Henk de Berg's intro book, Josh Cohen's intro book, Jonathan Lear's intro book, and Peter Gay's "Freud: A Life for Our Time".

I feel pretty much done with Freud for now. But I'm more than glad to have put in the time I did with the primary and introductory-secondary texts, because now I'm ready to graduate to advanced commentators on Freud's corpus -- some of which I'll be re-reading, such as Bersani's "The Freudian Body", which I had to struggle through in order to realize that yes, in fact I was interested enough to want to get this far (and indeed much further, in the future) into psychoanalysis. Freud's inductive argumentative method can lay some claim to empiricism, if only because it has no use for first principles (at least not until the late introduction of Erotic/Thanatotic dualism, and perhaps not even then). But the thinking really operates under the aegis of a wholly rationalistic epistemology. This is absolutely crucial, it seems to me, to the development of continental philosophy, even those writers who don't address Freud's claims about the psyche. Heidegger, from what little I know of him, seems to work in a similar way; and between Sigismund and Martin you've got the two main fountainheads of European philosophical thought for the past century. After the arrivals of Freud and Heidegger, any reconciliation of analytic thought and continental thought looks more or less hopeless. It also seems possible that this problem really goes back as far as Hegel, the first major philosopher to be totally unassimilable into the framework of analytics. Which implies that the problem is really (still!) to be found in Kant.

BUT the summer isn't over: my first semester of classes as a doctoral student don't begin until September. So my next project is to make sure that I know what I'm talking about with that last paragraph. To that end I'll be reading, and posting, over the next few weeks on Simon Critchley's "Very Short Introduction" to continental philosophy and Simon Glendegging's "The Idea of Continental Philosophy" (both quite brief), as well as Andrew Cutrofello's much more thorough "Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction."

If you don't have much to do with your life, stay tuned.